Originally Posted by
WesternSkies
50 seaters have a lot of seats to fill on some routes, I really don't think it goes away without a replacement of equal capacity.
You could actually take a few seats out and charge a premium to fly in to a few markets.
Or you could look at it from the macro level and remove service completely from markets that currently only support 50 seat aircraft. The economic reality is that many smaller markets are failing the "cost to operate vs. incremental network return" equation. A reasonable assumption is that some current 50 seat markets will do well with a larger aircraft (76 seat RJ), and others will be abandoned.
At UAL, the ALPA CBA "scope choke" will dictate the maximum number of RJ's being flown as UA has apparently made the decision to not introduce a new small narrow body aircraft.